Most RACI complaints aren't about RACI — they're about a RACI built once, in a workshop, laminated metaphorically, and never updated as the team changed. The framework gets blamed for a maintenance problem that would sink any planning artifact treated the same way.
What RACI actually solves
RACI assigns one of four roles — Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed — to each person for each significant decision or deliverable. Its real value shows up the first time two people both assumed they were "Accountable" for the same thing, or nobody was, and a decision stalled because of it. That ambiguity is invisible until it causes a delay, and RACI's only job is to make it visible before that happens, not after.
The most important rule: one Accountable per row
The single rule that makes RACI useful is that exactly one person is Accountable per item — not zero, not two. Teams that skip this and let "the team" be accountable for something have reinvented the exact ambiguity RACI was supposed to remove, just with an extra spreadsheet on top of it.
Don't build it for everything
A RACI matrix for every minor task is how RACI earns its bureaucratic reputation. It's worth the overhead for decisions that are cross-functional, recurring, or have previously caused confusion about ownership — not for work where the owner was never actually in question. If you're building a RACI row for something nobody has ever been confused about, that's a sign of process for its own sake.
Revisit it when the team changes, not on a calendar
A RACI matrix becomes theater specifically when the team it describes has changed — new hires, role shifts, a reorg — and the document hasn't. The fix isn't a recurring calendar reminder to "review RACI," which nobody keeps. It's tying the RACI to the same place the work and team structure are already tracked, so it's visibly stale the moment something about the team changes, instead of silently stale for a year.